[cheeselip420]

remote operation of vehicles often makes a lot of sense economically, since you can effectively decouple drivers from vehicles/riders. As you pointed out, this means you can shift to deal with peak loads and all of that - great.

Given everything you know now, was it wise to push for expansion over improvements to safety and reliability of the vehicles? On one hand, there is certainly value in expanding a bit to uncover edge-cases sooner. On the other hand, I'm not convinced it was worth expanding before getting the business sorted out.

My guess is that given the relatively large fixed costs involve in operating an AV fleet, that it makes some sense to expand at least up to that sort of 'break even' point. Do we know what that point is? Put differently, is there some natural "stopping point" of expansion where Cruise could hit break-even on its fixed costs and then shift focus towards reliability?

[_boffin_]

The first thing that came to my mind after reading, “… makes a lot sense” was the latency overhead that’s incurred when RA is activated and associating it with drunk driving due to the increased response time.

Maybe the article answers the following, but don’t know since I haven’t read it yet.

- median, p95, p99 latencies for remote assistance

- max speed vehicle can go when RA is activated.

[AlotOfReading]

I think a lot of the confusion here is over what's meant by "RA". This isn't a remote driving situation. It's like Waymo, where the human can make suggestions that give the robot additional information about the environment.

[cheeselip420]

Exactly. Not all remote assists need a low-latency connection.